Big Beach Sports Video Game Review

'Big Beach Sports' Trims a Lot of the Challenge and Some of the Fun from Sports

Take a sport, say football, or soccer. Take out most of the rules and restrictions then remove most of the players. Now simplify the basic physics of the movement of the ball in order to take out most of the difficulty and unpredictability.

This is appears to have been the process used to create THQ’s Big Beach Sports, a fitfully entertaining collection of beach sports games designed to be playable by anyone with arms.

There are six sports represented in Big Beach Sports: Disc Golf, Volleyball, Cricket, Bocce Ball, Soccer and Football.

Disc golf is a fairly successful golf-like game in which the player swings the remote in an arc to emulate tossing a Frisbee, trying to get it into a large basket. There are some obstacles on the beach like tiki lamps and trees to avoid, and sometimes it is necessary to toss the disk around a bend in the beach by tilting it as you throw.

This is pretty fun, although as with all the Big Beach Sports games things are made a little too simple. Many throwing games make the player hold down and release a button at the right time to signal when to let go of an object, but in Disc Golf you just swing your arm and the game decides the optimum time to let the disk fly forward. While it would have been more interesting with that added bit of complexity, Disc golf is still fairly entertaining.

The game I played the most was Bocce Ball, in which players compete to see who can get a large ball nearest a smaller target ball. A little like curling without the brooms, one uses balls both to get close to the target and to block the player’s shots or push away the opponent’s balls. The winner gets a point for every ball that is closer than the closest of the loser’s balls, which can result in a very sudden win or loss, as each side has four balls.

Once again, the game decides when the ball is actually released. It is also finicky about the throw; the player swings the Wii remote underarm style, and if you don’t swing hard enough the game simply pretends you didn’t do anything at all, which can be frustrating.

The other games are weaker. Soccer is particularly poor. I pretty much randomly hit buttons and was often unsure which team had the ball, yet I won by a wide margin. Volleyball simply involved doing a basic hit-hit-slam over and over. I was already completely bored by the time the score was 5 to 2, and when I finally won a game and realized that I had to play two more sets to win the match I hung my head in despair.

Cricket and Football fall somewhere in the middle on the fun meter. I’ve never played cricket before, so I have nothing to compare it with, and don’t, for that matter, understand the rules, but pitching or hitting the ball seemed to require some sort of skill and timing. It is not a bad time waster.

Football is interesting because football games are generally so complex and the Big Beach Sports version is so very, very simple. There are two players on each team. On offense you throw the ball to the other player, who runs towards the end zone. On defense you try to either knock the ball away before it is caught or tackle the player. You have very little control over where the ball goes or where the player runs to, yet I still felt a little thrill when I scored a touchdown.

The most interesting thing about Big Beach Sports has nothing to do with beach sports at all; the game has a very clever way to design an onscreen avatar. If you have a Nintendo DS you can use it as an input device, actually drawing features like a nose and eyes for your virtual self. My attempt did not come out well, but it’s still a neat idea that will hopefully someday find itself in a worthier game.

Big Beach Sports works mainly as a party game in which you can compete against your friends. Pretty much anything is fun if you can mock the guy next to you whenever you score a point. But overall, the game is too dumbed down for anyone with much experience with video games, and is seemingly aimed at young children and people who are forced to play video games by their young children.

There is nothing wrong with simplifying a sport to make it work in a video game format. But the goal is to remove extraneous elements while keeping the core action that makes that sport fun. If you work on the assumption that pretty much all the elements are extraneous, you can wind up with something like Big Beach Sports that simply fails to hold your attention.